Nickel-Plated Neutrality
Petsamo, where the Cold War is at its coldest
Stephen Littlesworth, Nordic Correspondent
The London International Journal, 21 February 2011
”Would you like to have some coffee?”, the man asks us as soon as we have removed our fur hats and heavy overcoats and introduced ourselves. The Finns and their coffee – the Nordic country boasts the highest per capita consumption of coffee anywhere in the world, and it is seemingly impossible to have a social event with the modest, taciturn Finns without drinking, or at least politely declining, a mug or two of typically light roasted coffee.
But then, when it is -26 degrees centigrade outside, like it is today in the most northern part of Finland, it is hard to turn down a hot mug of the ubiquitous beverage. Naturally, when our host sets up the table, the promised coffee comes with cinnamon sweet rolls, another Finnish staple. Satisfyingly brown and sugar-encrusted on top, and soft and sweet in the inside, with a Christmas-y aftertaste, the sweet rolls do certainly round up a quintessentially Finnish experience of a coffee break.
Jorma Leponen is the Organizing Secretary of the Petsamo Nickel Commission. A heavy-set man in his early sixties, he has an unhurried, grandfatherly air to him, with twinkling blue eyes under bushy eyebrows betraying a keen sense of humor. To say that his general outlook might remind one of Father Christmas himself might amount to an overload of Finland-related clichés at this point, but looking at Jorma thoughtfully sipping his coffee out of a mug decorated with Touko Laaksonen's beloved children's cartoon characters definitely evokes that image in this writer's mind.
Jorma is a veteran of Finnish nickel diplomacy. He started his career at the Commission in 1986, during the Solzhenitsyn thaw, and this spring will mark his 35 years anniversary at the office. He has inhabited the Commission's top spot since 1994, serving in the key position of the Finnish Foreign Ministry here in the north all through the Paasio and Eskelinen presidencies.
”It offers a unique view of the world”, the Organizing Secretary tells us of his job, ”to work with international officials here at the very top, in these fine surroundings, between the East and the West”.
The surroundings are indeed unique. The Commission building, called, predictably, Nikkelitalo, looks out across the waterfront of Petsamo's Liinahamari harbour. Designed by Alvar Aalto, Finland's famed modernist architect, it was constructed in 1955 to provide a permanent seat for the Petsamo Nickel Commission. Made up in all white with at turns rounded, at turns jagged outlines, the building evokes images of an ice sculpture or a particularly artistic iceberg. Since 2002, the building also includes a modern annex, built under Leponen's aegis, a more post-modern affair of grey Finnish granite hiding behind the 50s facáde of the main edifice.
Looking out from the big windows of the fourth-floor conference room, across the harbour area, the modern cargo cranes can be seen moving even in the bitter February cold. The harbour looks much like those in the nearby Norwegian coast: somehow heart-breakingly Nordic in its boring orderliness and efficiency. It is rather large for a town of 120 000 inhabitants, and besides the local Finns, Norwegians and Sami (and a small, traditional community of Soviet citizens), the local industry now also employs a significant number of Persian and Chilean expat workers, a state of affairs that has caused some interesting social and culinary changes in the town of Petsamo in the recent years.
”Our work never ends”, Leponen tells me, like reading my mind.
”Me and my predecessors have worked here in Petsamo since 1940 to help facilitate the division of the products of the Kolosjoki nickel mine to its stakeholders across international borders. Even after 70 years of production, the nickel deposit here shows no sign of being depleted. In fact, as you might have read in the media, our geologists just discovered a new sub-deposit last year and the plans are being drawn for its future as we speak – together with our international stakeholders, of course.”
Leponen often mentions the Commission's international stakeholders, as in practice he works for them as he does for the Finnish state. The Commission's buildings hold a number of permanent offices inhabited by both British and Soviet trade representatives, geologists and logistics people.
And diplomats, of course.
”We're all diplomats here”, Leponen tells me in a matter-of-fact voice and drains the last of his second mug of coffee.
”This is where we keep the peace, after all.”
That is certainly true. Finland, a nation that gained its independence in 1917, after the Russian revolution and its after-effects broke up the empire it had been a part of, has not participated in a war since its own brief but bitter civil war in early 1918. Together with Sweden, Finland is one of the two well-known Nordic neutrals, countries seemingly for ever walking the diplomatico-political tightrope between the interests of the ACTO nations, in the West, and the USSR and its allies in the East.
In actual fact, the history of the Petsamo Nickel Commission itself sheds light on the Finnish position in a rather illustrative way. Set up in January 1940, only a few months into the Second World War, the Commission was created due to the need to compromise between the Allied, German and Soviet interests to do with the production of nickel, a highly strategic metal, here in the far north. While the Finnish state had granted a concession to the Anglo-Canadian INCO Mond corporation to mine the strategic metal deposit in the Petsamo area, the beginning of the world war had made the German and Soviet governments to start eyeing the large deposit as well and to demand a part of the proceeds of the mine in the interest of Finnish neutrality in the war. The mine was in a couple years projected to become the biggest single source of nickel in all of Europe, and this was a fact the major powers could not disregard.
The Finnish position was tenuous. Even while during 1939 the Finnish government had managed to secure the open support of Sweden for rebuffing tentative Soviet demands for territorial ”corrections” to the Finno-Soviet border in Karelia and the coastal areas, the heavy anti-Communist turn in the Swedish late 1930s politics did not carry the Finno-Swedish cooperation as far as into an actual de jure military alliance. When the USSR then moved to take over the Baltic states, Finland needed to work hard to maintain its independence. To keep its neutrality, then, Finland had to negotiate between the major powers, and Petsamo nickel was to become one of the sub-fronts of the effort to maintain a position of some leeway between the bigger nations. After a grueling few months of talks, the first Agreement of Division, between the Finnish, British, Soviet and German governments as signatories, and the Swedish and Norwegian governments as observers, was signed in April 1940. This first draft of the Agreement gave 50% of the Petsamo nickel to the British and 25% to the Soviets and Germans both. Not one of the sides was happy with the deal, naturally, but in the end they were ready to agree to it as the path of least resistance – at this point.
”Over 70 years of dickering up here”, Leponen reminds me again, ”it has had an effect on Finnish political development in many ways.”
As the Organizing Secretary takes us on a brief tour of the building, I can't help but to think about Petsamo's unique position during the Second World War. A cold haven of peace, one of the few places in Europe during the Second World War where British, German and Soviet officers would pass each other daily on the streets without resorting to shooting at each other, and where political and trade representatives of the same nations would meet weekly in the then more humble offices of the Nickel Commission to negotiate about issues to do with the mining, smelting and transporting the Petsamo nickel to the ”stakeholder nations”. Here, the German intelligence tried to gauge the comings and goings of the Allied convoys to Murmansk and Archangelsk since 1941, and here, the Germans in turn were monitored by the Soviet, Allied, Finnish and Swedish intelligence services. During the war, to be sent to Petsamo was for an intelligence officer a posting that was important as much as it was hated, due to the cold and the remoteness of this small (but growing) port town.
During the war, the Petsamo nickel was transported to Britain past the Allied-held Norwegian coast, to the USSR with ships to Murmansk and to Germany with trucks across Finnish Lapland to the port of Oulu and then by Finnish and German freighters to Germany along the Baltic Sea. Attacking these transports was of course fair game when they were in international waters, or in the area of the combatant nations – but along the neutral territory of Finland, the Agreement of Division held, and in its own way bolstered the Finnish neutrality as well – even after Hitler launched his attack against the USSR in June 1941 and thus complicated the Finnish position even further.
Along the common negotiation halls of the Commission building, there is a line of at first black and white and later coloured photos of the men and women who have worked here to negotiate and then uphold and monitor the various versions of the Agreement of Division. Most are shown in traditional business attire, but during the Second World War and in the years after it, many also can be seen wearing military or quasi-military uniforms. Among the wartime photos, one can't help to notice a rare coloured one - Albert Speer in his Organization Todt brown, from late 1942.
While Nazi uniforms can be seen in many other WWII photos, too, since August 1943 they become conspicuously absent – that being the month when the Agreement of Division was finally revised to remove the German Reich from among the stakeholder nations, after an unofficial reduction of nickel transport to Germany for months, mirroring the Swedish push to cut iron ore exports to Germany at the same time. The Nazi leadership's protests, in the event, were shrill but practically inconsequential.
Actually, this part of the Commission building can be seen as something of a small museum, with mementos from the wartime, and from the early days of the Cold War since the fall of Berlin in January 1944 to the ups and downs of the relations between East and West in the post-war decades. They tell a familiar story from a different kind of a perspective, that of a small neutral, far away from the well-known continental flashpoints along the borders between West Germany and the Volksrepublik or the divided city of Rome.
At this point of the tour, Leponen introduces us to his successor. Niina Teräsvaara is a tall, stylish, determined-looking woman in her late 30s, a Helsinki University graduate and already an experienced Foreign Ministry hand. When we shake hands, her grip is steely. She says she ”dabbles” in weight-lifting. I don't doubt that for a moment. Jorma Leponen is due to leave his post and retire next year, and as is customary in the Commission, he has been tasked with using his last year on the job to break in and tutor his successor. It is easy to see that the old Secretary's relationship to Teräsvaara is a cordial one. His treatment of the younger official is almost fatherly.
When we again return to the conference room adjoining Leponen's spacious office, the outgoing Organizing Secretary looks out of the window contemplatively. Outside, to the left, a big Neste tanker has just arrived at the new oil port beside the state-of-the-art Liinahamari refinery. To the left of it, somewhat further away, one can see the presence of Finnish military power - a pair of missile corvettes of the Louhi II Class, designed for the Arctic waters and stationed here to protect the Finnish interest in the surrounding waters. They are armed with the latest generation Saab-Strömberg ASMs.
”Petsamo has changed”, Leponen tells us.
”When I started my work here, Finnish Atlantic fishing was still in full swing. Nordström's ships ferrying cod and herring from the Icelandic waters to fuel the industry here on the Arctic coast. It accounted for much of the town's growth in the 40s and 50s. Now – now the herring ships are gone, and replaced by tankers.”
The Finnish state's oil company, Neste, has been investing a lot into research and into tapping the oil and gas deposits under the icy Arctic Sea. Right now, it is engaged in heated competition with the Norwegian Statoil to set up oil rigs along the coastal areas. Potential cooperation agreements with the Soviets and the ACTO nations are being negotiated.
”Oil and natural gas are the future of Petsamo”, Leponen says and points to a painting on the wall depicting Neste's newest vessel, the LNG tanker Suursaari, built by the Wärtsilä Turku shipyard in 2009. It is a rather romantic depiction – a celebration of the traditional Finnish maritime industry, no doubt.
”When Niina next year takes my place in the negotiations with Goncharov and Eddington, the Soviet and British Trade Representatives, I am quite certain that the discussions will be still about nickel. But they will also be increasingly about the Arctic hydrocarbons, even if it is not said aloud.”
The experienced Organizing Secretary smiles to us.
”At some point, it will be said aloud. Things change, even here in Petsamo. Were I a younger man, I might even find it all rather exciting, as I am sure my successor does. She is keen to begin making her mark, certainly.”
I look at the signed photo on the wall from the 60th anniversary summit in honour of the Agreement of Division, held in the year 2000. Leponen is sitting between Prime Minister Fry and Karelin, the Soviet Premier - like his nation, like his Petsamo, sits between the West and the East. Neutral, helpful, carefully affable and matter-of-fact.
Leponen nods, now with a slightly mournful edge to his smile.
”I've had a good run. But all things must come to an end. Truth to be told, I'm grown too old for all this cold. It is a younger person's job to look after things up here. I'm looking forward to retiring to my family villa on the Karelian Isthmus – from now on, I'll spend my summers in Terijoki, reading and going to the beach with my wife and grandkids. And in the winter, I'll go to Spain.”
Waiting for the train to take us south to Rovaniemi and its international airport, in -26 degrees Celsius, with a wind blasting down from the North Pole, I can fully understand the view of the Organizing Secretary of the Petsamo Nickel Commission.
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